“I Loved It From Chapter 8″

So, remember how last time on the blog I was feeling “nostalgic” and “zen”?? And, remember in the blog post before that, I was so close to finishing my fourth book, So Far Into You?

My feeling of zen lasted about a week, until my Beta readers started sending me their feedback for the book I’d just finished.

You see, I was so sure I’d wave that book into the world of Beta readers… and welcome their glowing feedback as it flooded back in lucious waves of WOW, WOW, WOW!!

Or not, as it turned out.

It wasn’t that my Beta partners didn’t like my book, they just didn’t love it. They didn’t get my hero… they didn’t particularly like him. They didn’t like the start.

Some of the comments were:

Gina has to go. (Gulp. Gina was the opening scene).
Seth is too nasty. We have to like your hero too.
I loved it from Chapter 8.
The ending is rushed.
The antagonist rolls over too quickly.
Something worse has to happen at the end.
I want another scene with Seth and Remy at the start.
We love Remy. (Everybody loves Remy).

So I cursed the world for about 24 hours, and then I re-read all the gold they’d sent me, and thought about how right they were.

So, with my very best pair of slash/hack editing scissors, I lopped off Gina’s head, and started again.

One of the hardest things I find is to get good distance from my writing. Because I know the story inside and out, and I know what my characters are feeling and why they do what they do, it gets very easy to not take readers with me… to make leaps and jumps that feel like they’re perfectly reasonable, while readers who don’t know the story are left floundering in a world of: “WTF just happened there?”

So tonight, I’ve finished this book AGAIN. Four years, three weeks and one day in gestation. I don’t know how much more of this pregnancy I can take!